The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight

by Dan B. Allender

We cannot, of course, stand against what we don’t know.

I could be civil, if not polite, but I would not let that man have any of my heart.

And it is only love that can transform heartache into honor and delight. What grows the soul of a marriage is the practice of joining in the suffering of the other. We are not meant to be alone in our suffering. We are called to bear each other’s pain and sorrow and, by doing so, strengthen and deepen the sinews of our love.

“what fires together, wires together.”3 What deepens our emotional attunement increases our relational intimacy.

Second, a tragic result of our trauma is that we’ve learned to shut down our emotional attunement to our own suffering, which also dulls our capacity to feel on behalf of others.

Every fault, every failure, every form of darkness in our hearts melts before the presence of the one who is love.

I enter the suffering of Jesus when I enter the stories of Becky’s past.

Anytime I anticipate Becky’s redemption, I am compelled to imagine my own, sparking desire for my own transformation.

This is another way we are to enter into our spouses’ suffering: to grieve their dreams that have died.

There are costs to dreams, whether they end up fading or succeeding. We are meant to suffer the conception, gestation, labor, birth, and feeding of dreams together.

The despair of achieving what they thought they craved turned the dream into a mistress that inevitably betrayed them.

Our sorrow is meant to increase our wisdom. Psalm 90:10 plainly states that “the best of [our days] are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away”—and this reality is not meant to increase fear or despair. It allows us to live with greater freedom and passion, alive to the present, anticipating the future.

The psalmist went on to pray, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). We must be taught to count our days. It is not something we will do without instruction. To number our days is to be aware that tomorrow is not inevitable simply because we have things to do and appointments on our calendars.

Do I really want to haggle over who did the dishes yesterday? Do I want to worry about paying off the credit card or going to my best friend’s destination wedding? Is the conflict over what restaurant we eat at worth the energy, given this could be our last meal together? Facing death helps us put things in perspective and frees us to view life as a gift, not an entitlement. If we live aware that our time is limited and our next breath could be our last, we can receive each day as a benediction, a word of blessing that ...

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Play is meant to cultivate delight.

“The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships.”1 Play is an essential part of a healthy life—and of a healthy marriage. Without it, we simply can’t flourish.

Sometimes the ambivalence to play is rooted in unresolved hurt.

The primary way a child feels connected to a parent is through play. If the parent is repeatedly unavailable to play, the child can internalize the parent’s unavailability as a reflection of the child’s worth. A lack of play is a form of misattunement and contributes significantly to shame. The child might assume, I must not be that important. I must not matter.

Play communicates to our partners that they are chosen, remembered, and desired. It is a powerful antidote to shame. It helps rewrite the internal scripts our partners may be rehearsing.

Marriage is the tree that needs fertilizer to flourish, and play is the fertilizer. It’s the manure, the good stuff that’s vital for growth. But it won’t necessarily feel easy or appealing. It will take effort, patience, and hope.

The soil of our hearts is impenetrable unless we tend to it with intentional play. That is what will slowly help us establish deep roots over time and bring forth fruit.

Play is nourishment for our souls. The National Institute for Play calls it “the gateway to vitality.”

Doing activities repeatedly together reinforces the heart posture of, I choose you. I am with you. That consistency of emotional presence strengthens our connection. It’s why the simplest rituals can carry meaning; they establish a predictability that soothes, a structure that regulates, a reliability that reassures.

The process of choosing whether to bless or curse is messy and jagged, but there are moments when the choice is simple.

Most moments in a marriage—cutting the lawn, taking out the garbage, cleaning up dog poop, driving kids to school, paying bills—feel inevitable and uneventful. They are not instances when the choice to bless or curse feels relevant. It is at moments of adversity and extremity that the question is most crucial. If it doesn’t come into our purview, we will simply cope to survive and minimize pain. While this will feel natural and harmless, it is unwittingly joining the kingdom of evil.

A curse cuts your partner, making them pay for your failure and pain, and provides an escape from suffering the furrowing of your soul. It is a judgment, a stance of contempt, that freezes the other in the pronouncement that there is nothing good to be enjoyed. “You are such an idiot.” “You will never change.” “You don’t think about anyone or anything other than yourself.” “You ruin everything I try to do.” “You are a liar.”

What we must not miss is that we can just as often turn curses against ourselves or allow the cursing of others to remain in us.

I had to orient my heart back to Becky, despite my hurt and the sense of injustice I felt in her response.

A curse settles the future with an unbending, never-ending finality. There is no room for change and growth. If a blessing is like a verdant, green garden that prepares for growing good fruit, a curse is an arid, bone-dry desert that settles for certainty that nothing can possibly grow. A curse scorches the earth and dumps contaminating chemicals that poison the ground. A blessing makes way for lavish goodness, daring to hope for beauty and newness.

We don’t merely plant seeds and then go harvest fruit. It takes work. It takes knowledge and determination. It takes intention.

To bless my beloved, however, I must become beloved. Or perhaps truer said, I must enter how beloved I am.

We can start to loosen up those locks on our hearts by getting curious.

In what ways am I more accustomed to cursing than blessing?

Assess where you are. How much intentional blessing or unwitting cursing might currently exist in your marriage?

On one hand, it’s hard to imagine how we ended up there. But on the other, our past stories were clearly playing out in the present, and we were bearing the combined impact of extensive travel, sorrow from loss, and grating physical ailments.

It seemed so ridiculous that a refrigerator would derail us like that. He’s being such a baby, I kept thinking. He needs to grow up and notice he hasn’t starved so far. I won’t let his struggle be my fault. Every time I repeated these sentences, I felt secure but cold and enraged.

And my apology opened the door for me to give him the greatest blessing I could: a true desire to know what he feared and to be with him in it.

But what feels truer is that the Spirit had been interceding for us and brought us both to the desire not to curse, but to bless.

I asked myself, why do I love, and what is the power of beauty, and I understood that each and every instance of beauty is a promise and example, in miniature, of life that can end in balance, with symmetry, purpose, and hope—even if without explanation. MARK HELPRIN

Marriage is not merely a conflict between two people; it is a battle with every form of death that threatens to separate the couple.

How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize?

We didn’t “evangelize.” We simply shared our story, and it involves Jesus. We believe. We don’t believe. We both know we need help.

Our marriages are not ours to possess, just as our partners, fellow image bearers, are not ours to possess. We offer an outpouring of love, and all love is a gift. It is undeserved and stems from a love that is greater than any we could conjure on our own.

On our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I asked our children to write a letter to Becky and me answering the question, What have you learned about life from watching our marriage? Then we all went to a restaurant and read the letters together. It is one of the richest nights in our memory.

What are we most wanting for you? The answer is simple. Bless what your spouse reveals about your need for grace. Bless them for being the face of God and at times the smell of hell. Stay in the conflict until you need to care for your body and your fragmenting brain. Return and ask the question of yourself and your spouse that Steve and Lisa borrowed from God: Where are you? Meaning, Where have you gone? Do you want to come back?

We are to realize that much of our present story flows from the pages of the past, but if we go back and scribble in the margins of our heartache, we can start writing a new story.

But we’ll never get to step into that until we open ourselves to it.

What we offer each other then becomes the fruit—the bread, meat, cheese, and wine—that we can set before you, and everyone we know, to eat. It’s a lavish banquet of delights that is free to us all, because it came at the cost of another: Jesus, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The one who came to give us life to the full, who is now preparing for us the complete, heavenly banquet, said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink” (7:37).